Ten years of Windows XP: how longevity became a curse

Ten years ago today, Windows XP hit the retail market. After a rocky start, it …

Windows XP's retail release was October 25, 2001, ten years ago today. Though no longer readily available to buy, it continues to cast a long shadow over the PC industry: even now, a slim majority of desktop users are still using the operating system.

Windows XP didn't boast exciting new features or radical changes, but it was nonetheless a pivotal moment in Microsoft's history. It was Microsoft's first mass-market operating system in the Windows NT family. It was also Microsoft's first consumer operating system that offered true protected memory, preemptive multitasking, multiprocessor support, and multiuser security.

The transition to pure 32-bit, modern operating systems was a slow and painful one. Though Windows NT 3.1 hit the market in 1993, its hardware demands and software incompatibility made it a niche operating system. Windows 3.1 and 3.11 both introduced small amounts of 32-bit code, and the Windows 95 family was a complex hybrid of 16-bit and 32-bit code. It wasn't until Windows XP that Windows NT was both compatible enough—most applications having been updated to use Microsoft's Win32 API—and sufficiently light on resources.

In the history of PC operating systems, Windows XP stands alone. Even Windows 95, though a landmark at its release, was a distant memory by 2005. No previous PC operating system has demonstrated such longevity, and it's unlikely that any future operating system will. Nor is its market share dominance ever likely to be replicated; at its peak, Windows XP was used by more than 80 percent of desktop users.

The success was remarkable for an operating system whose reception was initially quite muted. In the wake of the September 11th attacks, the media blitz that Microsoft planned for the operating system was toned down; instead of arriving with great fanfare, it slouched onto the market. Retail sales, though never a major way of delivering operating systems to end users, were sluggish, with the operating system selling at a far slower rate than Windows 98 had done three years previously.

It faced tough competition from Microsoft's other operating systems. Windows 2000, released less than two years prior, had won plaudits with its marriage of Windows NT's traditional stability and security to creature comforts like USB support, reliable plug-and-play, and widespread driver support, and was widely adopted in businesses. For Windows 2000 users, Windows XP was only a minor update: it had a spruced up user interface with the brightly colored Luna theme, an updated Start menu, and lots of little bits and pieces like a firewall, UPnP, System Restore, and ClearType. Indeed, many professionals and, for want of a better term, nerds, were turned off by the Luna theme, with its detractors dismissing Windows XP as a Fisher-Price operating system.

The familiar Windows XP desktop with Luna theme

For home users using Windows 95-family operating systems, Windows XP had much more to offer, thanks to its substantially greater stability and security, especially once Service Pack 2 was released. But even there, users didn't leap immediately. Windows XP's hardware demands, though modest by today's standards, were steeper than those of the Windows 95 family, and in its early days at least, neither Windows XP's driver support nor performance could match those of its technologically inferior sibling. Gamers, in particular, were vocal in their criticism of Windows XP, and many vowed to stick with Windows 98SE indefinitely.

In the first year of Windows XP's availability, Microsoft had to work to persuade even enterprises to ditch Windows 95, in spite of its near complete unsuitability to enterprise computing.

In the end, none of the objections mattered. Time made Windows XP a success. Computers got faster, rendering its hardware demands first ubiquitous, and then later in its life, almost laughable. Driver support grew, and driver performance improved. Instead of being a heavyweight alternative to use if you had the resources and you could be sure that all your hardware and software would work with it, it became the obvious choice of system software. The explosion in Internet usage, and the focus on system security, made continued use of the Windows 95 family untenable. Windows XP was therefore the only choice for most desktop users, and within a few years of its release, most Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT 4, and Windows 2000 users had made the switch.

The long life of Windows XP

Over the course of its life, Microsoft made Windows XP a much better operating system. Service Pack 2, released in 2004, was a major overhaul of the operating system. It made the software better able to handle modern systems, with improved WiFi support and a native Bluetooth stack, and made it far more secure. The firewall was enabled by default, the bundled Internet Explorer 6 gained the "gold bar" popup blocker and ActiveX security feature, and for hardware that supported it, Data Execution Protection made it more difficult to exploit software flaws.

Microsoft also produced a number of variants of the base operating system. The two major ones were Windows XP Media Center Edition and Windows XP Tablet Edition. These were efforts to push Windows into new kinds of market—the TV-connected home theater PC, and the pen-powered tablet—though neither met with any great commercial success, and for Windows Vista, their features were rolled into the core product rather than shipping as standalone versions.

But in many ways, the thing that cemented Windows XP's status wasn't Windows XP itself: it was the lack of any successor. Microsoft's Longhorn project, an ambitious plan to radically rework Windows, with an all-new set of APIs and a database-like filesystem, was delayed and ultimately abandoned entirely. Windows Vista, a massively scaled back, more conservative release, eventually arrived in 2006, but by this time Windows XP had become so dominant that users, particularly business users, didn't want a new operating system. That Windows Vista had trouble in its early days, thanks to its steeper hardware demands, its polarizing appearance, and display driver issues—mirroring, in many ways, Windows XP's own introduction—just served to entrench Windows XP further. Business users stuck with Windows XP, and Windows Vista struggled to ever make a serious dent in its predecessor's market share, peaking at just 19 percent in the final days before Windows 7's release.

Had Windows Longhorn been more successful, and had Windows Vista arrived sooner, Windows XP's market share dominance would never have been achieved. Windows 7, though well-received and widely liked, will be lucky to hit 50 percent market share before its replacement, Windows 8, hits the market (assuming Microsoft manages to avoid any development disasters). With a new operating system coming out every two to three years, which is Microsoft's plan, there simply isn't enough time to amass that much market share.

Long in the tooth it may be, but Windows XP still basically works. Regardless of the circumstances that led to its dominance and longevity, the fact that it remains usable so long after release is remarkable. Windows XP was robust enough, modern enough, well-rounded enough, and usable enough to support this extended life. Not only was Windows XP the first (and only) PC operating system that lasted ten years: it was the first PC operating system that was good enough to last ten years. Windows 98 didn't have the security or stability; Windows 2000 didn't have the security or comfort; Mac OS X 10.1 didn't have the performance, the richness of APIs, or the hardware support.

The downside of longevity

As much as businesses have enjoyed the ability to standardize on one operating system for a decade, the effect of Windows XP's long life and massive market share has its downsides. Windows XP is today a very tired platform, one that hasn't kept up with modern developments. Installing it onto systems with new RAID or SATA controllers is a miserable experience. Installing it on systems without optical drives is also troublesome. Though Service Pack 2 took steps to improve security, it still falls a long way short of Windows Vista and Windows 7 in that regard, thanks to newer features such as address space layout randomization and User Account Control. The technology it uses is dated; Windows 7 and Mac OS X both use GPUs' powerful 3D capabilities to accelerate their user interfaces (to a greater or lesser extent). Windows XP does not. Windows XP also lacks a true 64-bit version; though a Windows XP for x86-64 processors was released, it was actually a rebranded version of Windows Server 2003, a decision which caused various compatibility issues. Windows Vista and Windows 7, in contrast, both have mainstream, well-supported 64-bit versions.

New versions of Windows offer value to developers, too. Direct3D 10, for example, only supports Windows Vista and Windows 7; it's not available on Windows XP. The continued widespread usage of the old operating system makes it much harder for developers to depend on these new features: every time they do, they rule out the ability to sell to half of all current Windows users, and that's a bitter pill to swallow. More aggressive migration away from Windows XP would enable the development of better third-party applications.

Given current trends, Windows 7 will overtake XP within the next year, with many businesses now moving away from the decade-old OS in earnest. Not all—there are still companies and governments rolling out Windows XP on new hardware—but the tide has turned. Windows XP, with its weaker security and inferior support for modern hardware, is now becoming a liability; Windows 7 is good enough for business and an eminently worthy successor, in a way that Windows Vista was never felt to be.

Nonetheless, it will be several years before developers and administrators can put Windows XP behind them. Its support is due to end on April 8th, 2014, and while that date is still some years off, it's all but inevitable that there will be organizations still using the operating system right up to the cut-off. Beyond the support cut-off, companies will still be allowed to downgrade their volume licenses, but they won't receive any further security patches if they do.

When Microsoft wanted to stop OEM preinstallations of Windows XP in 2007, there was a widespread backlash against the decision. It wouldn't be surprising to see a campaign of some kind to extend support for the operating system, and no doubt there will be some companies claiming that they somehow didn't have enough time to phase out Windows XP. Redmond did extend the length of time that OEMs could ship systems with Windows XP preinstalled in response to customer demands, but it's hard to see the company lengthening the operating system's support period beyond the cut-off.

Ten years is a good run for any operating system, but it really is time to move on. Windows 7 is more than just a solid replacement: it is a better piece of software, and it's a much better match for the software and hardware of today. Being usable for ten years is quite an achievement, but the stagnation it caused hurts, and is causing increased costs for administrators and developers alike. As incredible as Windows XP's longevity has been, it's a one-off. Several factors—the 32-bit transition, the Longhorn fiasco, even the lack of competition resulting from Apple's own Mac OS X transition—conspired to make Windows XP's position in the market unique. We should not want this situation to recur: Windows XP needs to be not only the first ten-year operating system; it also needs to be the last.

252 Reader Comments

All those words and yet one was missed: monopoly. You can't really talk about XP - or any other Microsoft OS - without talking about the companies anti-competitive practices. For example, the way they strong-armed VARs into selling only Windows... Sure the Bush Administration let them off the hook, but the court's judgement still stands.

I can't see moving beyond Win 7 for the gaming rigs I assemble, at least as long as Win >8 keep Win 8's schizophrenic interface and its onerous installation restrictions. Win 7 is looking to be the next XP from my vantage point.

All those words and yet one was missed: monopoly. You can't really talk about XP - or any other Microsoft OS - without talking about the companies anti-competitive practices. For example, the way they strong-armed VARs into selling only Windows... Sure the Bush Administration let them off the hook, but the court's judgement still stands.

I use XP everyday....thanks to my company's IT dept. Things aren't changing for a while either from what I hear. Maybe, and I hear it's just a maybe, next year (2012), we'll see just the start of a slow and graduated rollout of Win7. LOL.

That being said. I don't particularly feel that using XP is leaving me out in the cold much. I have Win7 at home too, it lives in relative harmony with my XP machines, and I use both OS' interchangeably without much hassle. I have relatively up to date hardware (3-4 years old) on the system I use the most, and there isn't really any software I'm locked out of.

"We should not want this situation to recur: Windows XP needs to be not only the first ten-year operating system; it also needs to be the last."

It feels like you completely missed the point.

Stability.Matters.

In today's fast-paced, constantly iterating (not innovating, as they claim) world, "good enough" is an alien concept, a foreign language. Yet we reached "good enough" ten years ago and it shows no signs of ever going away.

I can't see moving beyond Win 7 for the gaming rigs I assemble, at least as long as Win >8 keep Win 8's schizophrenic interface and its onerous installation restrictions. Win 7 is looking to be the next XP from my vantage point.

Don't worry,some enterprising independent developer will manage to block that nightmare and this way we'll have the best of both worlds - a usable true Desktop UI and the Win8 back-end goodness

[quote=fung81]Remember in 2001 doing a clean install opens the permissions of the shared folder to read/write public.

I hooked my new windows XP Computer onto the network !Bam! Got a virus. Those were the days.

I played with it for 3 hours and went back to Windows 98SE. I was running a free giveaway version from a MS developers conference. [/quote]

Yep,I had a similar first brush with XP back in '03 (I think)... By the time the installation of the basic OS and essential drivers was completed,my computer was already compromised. (And the kicker is that I didn't use some dodgy site do find and get the needed drivers ) Needless to say,I reverted to 2000 faster than you can shout ' XP sux!'

Looking back it makes me angry that MS had such a powerful multimedia platform, Media Center, and failed (didn't try) to push it out to people's living rooms or develop it into a store and device sync platform like iTunes.

It could have been the Zune's advantage. Only recently has the Zune UI picked up where media center left off, but it comes with it's own set of issues.

I can't see moving beyond Win 7 for the gaming rigs I assemble, at least as long as Win >8 keep Win 8's schizophrenic interface and its onerous installation restrictions. Win 7 is looking to be the next XP from my vantage point.

But Windows 7 is supposed to be 'the business option' when Win8 releases, right? I think it will continue to evolve along Win8> (Metro Windows?). And besides, Microsoft would be really stupid not to listen to all the hate they've been getting. Though distant memories of a 'courier' arrise...

All those words and yet one was missed: monopoly. You can't really talk about XP - or any other Microsoft OS - without talking about the companies anti-competitive practices. For example, the way they strong-armed VARs into selling only Windows... Sure the Bush Administration let them off the hook, but the court's judgement still stands.

Pirated XP is still installed far more than Linux despite being an OS from 2001.

Linux on the desktop has shortcomings and pretending they don't exist won't make them go away.

Microsoft used strong arm tactics but the competition also sucked. I have known many geeks that chose XP over Linux because they found the latter to be too much of a hassle, not because of OEMs or software compatibility.

"We should not want this situation to recur: Windows XP needs to be not only the first ten-year operating system; it also needs to be the last."

It feels like you completely missed the point.

Stability.Matters.

In today's fast-paced, constantly iterating (not innovating, as they claim) world, "good enough" is an alien concept, a foreign language. Yet we reached "good enough" ten years ago and it shows no signs of ever going away.

Except, it wasn't good enough 10 years ago, it took more years to reach good enough and then finally "stable". As well, in a business, you need an upgrade path. If you love your XP+IE6 setup, where will you be in 2020? If that hardware fails, will it be worth trying to hunt down some obscure part because you made no effort to have a clear path forward? That was the point of this article, XP was dominant for too long. These faster upgrade cycles also force developers to keep up rather than to stagnate on one platform. Everything we do in computing is different from 10 years ago, from our hardware to consumerization of IT. Shit changes, so pay attention or pay the price.

Security? Really? The original release of XP was one of the worst security fiascos in computer history. Just as home broadband access was ramping up, XP was configured out of the box with lots of unnecessary open TCP ports -- something that Unix distributions had learned in the 1980s not to do. At one point, a default XP configuration placed on an unsecure network would be compromised within several minutes.

Monopoly plays only a minor role in XP's story, the ubiquity of internal systems built around it (IE6.0 how are ya?), the fact that a lot of IT techs have no Vista/Win7 experience and the ability to create images without a proper Volume Licence being in place means it's not going anywhere either. Oh and nothing else has come close to being attractive for large organisations, you may know Linux well but how many people interviewing for non-IT roles would and how do you cover the cost of training them?

The latter two in particular are huge for large IT organisations, anyone who has ever worked with sysprep can tell you that it is an altogether more complicated beast in Vista/Win7 (one flat text file vs an xml document with 7 'phases'). That complexity allows for all sort of great stuff like the 'one image to rule them all' and driver stores but you're not picking that stuff up as you go along.

The existence of the OEM VL Key on microsoft.com has allowed countless customers to create complete XP system images without any VL in place to the extent that a lot of them stopped buying VL. Just to be clear if you don't have a VL in place you're not licensed to create an image for deployment, that's why MS sell Win Pro licences. Now Vista didn't originally have a key like XP online but they relented as it foundered in the market but with Win7 they don't have to, if you want to create an image with Win7 you have to fork out to MS. This alone has scuppered Win 7 rollouts for some of my customers who hadn't budgeted for O/S license costs

The transition will happen but right now I suspect I'll be supporting IT teams focused on XP in the majority of my customers for at least 2 more years.

I can't see moving beyond Win 7 for the gaming rigs I assemble, at least as long as Win >8 keep Win 8's schizophrenic interface and its onerous installation restrictions. Win 7 is looking to be the next XP from my vantage point.

But Windows 7 is supposed to be 'the business option' when Win8 releases, right? I think it will continue to evolve along Win8> (Metro Windows?). And besides, Microsoft would be really stupid not to listen to all the hate they've been getting. Though distant memories of a 'courier' arrise...

I agree, Win 7 may become the de facto business OS, especially since businesses are already rolling it out due to Win 7's better compatibility with new software (Office, Server 2008) and increased security.

But I don't see why Win 8 can't be successful there either. In all honestly, most business are running just a handful of apps, and Win 8 lends itself to that environment. Most business users aren't really "power users" where I think Metro falls flat.

I use XP everyday....thanks to my company's IT dept. Things aren't changing for a while either from what I hear. Maybe, and I hear it's just a maybe, next year (2012), we'll see just the start of a slow and graduated rollout of Win7. LOL.

I've heard that for years. I strongarmed my IT dept to install W7 on my new workstation (16GB of RAM, woooo!) but for everyone else, incompatibilities with existing software and websites (IE8/IE9), combined with the economic downturn leaves us on XP for the most part. I want my company to migrate, I've given them tips, I debugged all the issues with my W7 machine so it runs flawlessly, I've told them how to fix their websites (the HTML or HTTP header tag to force IE9 into IE7 compat mode), I just get the feeling they don't care about upgrading from XP. It works well enough, most users don't require more than 2GB of RAM for their apps, and those who do are doomed to suffer because IT's own self-interests (aka their bottom line) matters more than their users productivity.

And besides, Microsoft would be really stupid not to listen to all the hate they've been getting. Though distant memories of a 'courier' arrise...

User hate (fear) has to be taken with the smallest grain of salt. If companies were beholden to user UI preferences (that they never change) ebay would look like craigslist and amazon would have 20 tabs in the main navigation.

Things change, and usually for the better, but you don't know that until you try (not just see).

Also it can take some time for things to fully bake, this is most recently apparent in the Ubuntu review regarding the Unity Shell.

"Windows XP didn't boast exciting new features". I stopped reading there because that's a load of crap/myth. XP came with a large number of NEW and EXCITING features. Read more about them here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_XP . XP was a very well engineered system that improved by orders of magnitude upon Windows 2000. Its popularity and continued use demonstrate just how well designed the system was. Great compatibility, excellent stability and performance. Security was an Achilles heel but SP2 nailed it and XP became a very good OS.

Windows 7 has some nice features but plenty of regressions too. Windows 7 can't even do basic operations like freely arrange pictures in a folder or not force a sorting order on files. The search is totally ruined for real-time searching, WMP12 is a UI disaster. Service packs and updates take hours to install instead of minutes and can't be slipstreamed into setup files. There's no surround sound audio in games. There is no choice of a Classic Start Menu. Windows Explorer, the main app where I live (instead of living on Facebook) is thoroughly dumbed down.

It's not that enterprises are terrified by change, it's that they're terrified by cost.

Unless you're in Sales, it's a serious challenge to go back to the business and ask them to rewrite half the intranet apps, or upgrade the ERP, or whatever, because you want to change the OS. The muckity-mucks that approve budgets, both in IT and in the business, are not going to add a zero to the wrong side of a desktop rollout, certainly not because they themselves signed off on some shoddy piece of crap nearly a decade ago, never mind getting extra resources for QA and training.

And this was the case in the good old days. Now? In the era of lowered (sales) expectations? Hell, no.

This is how we get things like ThinApp and virtual XP mode running IE6 for some crufty intranet webapp developed by either the lowest bidder.

Security? Really? The original release of XP was one of the worst security fiascos in computer history. Just as home broadband access was ramping up, XP was configured out of the box with lots of unnecessary open TCP ports -- something that Unix distributions had learned in the 1980s not to do. At one point, a default XP configuration placed on an unsecure network would be compromised within several minutes.

im at work posting this in xp. it has a custom load screen, logon screen and an ls theme all designed (by me) around the company and the programs we use. its fast and beautiful and its all that is needed.

but when i get home, win8dp and lion and you couldnt pay me enough to go back to earlier os versions.

And besides, Microsoft would be really stupid not to listen to all the hate they've been getting. Though distant memories of a 'courier' arrise...

User hate (fear) has to be taken with the smallest grain of salt. If companies were beholden to user UI preferences (that they never change) ebay would look like craigslist and amazon would have 20 tabs in the main navigation.

Things change, and usually for the better, but you don't know that until you try (not just see).

Also it can take some time for things to fully bake, this is most recently apparent in the Ubuntu review regarding the Unity Shell.

You've got it there. Sometimes I feel like digging through the old Ars articles from people who hated the new UI in XP, and the new UI in Vista, and the new UI in Windows 7...plus their protests that "this is different than that last time! this time people really WILL ignore the new technology because of the UI!" I've lived long enough and through enough Windows UI changes to know this is always the patern. You can come on Ars and claim that Metro will make you keep Win7 for eternity until the first really nice device that takes advantage of it comes along, with some nice programs that use it, and you'll forget this entire discussion until we get the preview of Win9 in 2-3 years. The changes (and complaints about them) are like clockwork.

I don't understand why MS made the support window so long. As soon as they released Vista, they should've said "you have five years". Instead MS said, "we won't give you an incentive to upgrade for the next 10 years, have fun!"

"Windows XP didn't boast exciting new features or radical changes, but it was nonetheless a pivotal moment in Microsoft's history. It was Microsoft's first mass-market operating system in the Windows NT family. It was also Microsoft's first consumer operating system that offered true protected memory, preemptive multitasking, multiprocessor support, and multiuser security."

Talk about contradictions. First, claim there were no new or exciting features, then list a bunch of them. XP was the first fully 32 bit Windows OS and broke dependence on DOS. I'd say it did offer radical changes for the better.

How often do you need a new spoken language or a new hammer? When people spend effort learning how to use an operating system and that operating system meets their needs, change is a losing proposition. The quality of Microsoft's work is going down. But Microsoft's quality is still far better than almost any of the low grade work that is standard for the Web. Windows 7 does offer some improvement over XP and it is a more mature operating system. It will be used longer than XP and it remains to be seen how long XP's life will turn out to be. The quality of the Web is still low. Even the most basic forms and security sign in applications are primitive and often broken. It may easily take another decade. But the approach Microsoft is talking about with Windows 8 probably will eventually will provide a mature system based on the HTML DOM as the standard UI. Between that and XAML, it is hard to see why anything more will be needed. The days of ever changing operating systems are drawing to a close.

This is my last day with Windows XP. I've already replaced it a long time ago at home, and my new job laptop with 7 is supposed to arrived tomorrow. I won't miss it.

I do remember when it launched. It was slow, bugged and ugly. I stayed on Windows 2000 I nearly until SP2. At the time Windows 2000 was perfectly able to run all the game, was lean and fast. I remember upgrading my RAM to 1Gig. It was enormous at the time, and 2000 feeled like a breeze. SP2 brang a lot and I finaly jumped the train. Now a few years later, 7 feeling like 2000, but with all the whistles and bells, XP seems so old and tired.